It's 2035.
Imagine LIFE magazine is revived for one special printed issue, and Oregon makes the cover for getting sustainability right.We've been part of the cover story before.In 1947, the Crown Zellerbach mill in West Linn developed a method for coating paper with clay and carbonate, producing the smooth surface needed for high-quality color printing.By the 1950's, the West Linn mill supplied coated paper for magazines including TIME and LIFE throughout the western United States, including Hawaii, Alaska, and Japan.Now imagine the 2035 cover.What do imagine you see?
Oregon once made paper 15 1/2 feet wide.
In 1869, The Oregonian was the first and only customer of Henry Pittock’s small paper mill near Oregon City, buying 900 pounds of newsprint a week.By 1912, Crown-Columbia had ordered an new Fourdrinier for its mill in Camas, Washington. Built by Bagley & Sewall In Watertown, New York.The machine could manufacture a continuous sheet of newsprint 186 inches– 15 1/2 feet wide– considered the largest at the time.
Oregon once imported wastepaper
Blue Heron in Oregon City and the Newberg Paper Mill turned old newspapers and other recovered paper into new products. They needed so much fiber that Oregon actually imported wastepaper from outside the state.Blue Heron closed in 2011, after competition from Asian paper mills helped drive up the price of recovered paper. Newberg was idled in 2015 and permanently closed the following year. Oregon lost two major local buyers for the mixed paper collected through its recycling programs.Increasingly, that paper went to China.Chinese mills needed recovered fiber for the country's growing paper and packaging industry. They paid higher prices and accepted more contamination. After the Oregon mills closed, China became the primary customer for Oregon's recovered paper–roughly two-thirds.Then China changed the rules.In 2017–18, it restricted imports of unsorted recovered paper and imposed a contamination limit of just 0.5%.Oregon's contamination rate for recovered materials is roughly 8–13%.Today, some recovered paper stays in the Northwest; some goes to mills overseas. Oregon now requires processors to document where those materials go and demonstrate that they reach responsible end markets.
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